The ball at the start: what to expect from the match between Krasnodar and CSKA

On July 12, Kazan will host the opening of a new season in Russian football. The Russian Cup winner CSKA Moscow and the national champion Krasnodar will meet in the match for the National Super Cup. Read more about the upcoming trophy game in the Izvestia article.

Without logic

Krasnodar has zero Russian Super Cups. CSKA has seven of them, and according to this indicator, the red and blue are in second place in the country after Zenit (St. Petersburg has nine of them). The last one, however, was quite a long time ago, in 2018, when the Army team, the Cup winners, unexpectedly beat the champion, Lokomotiv. Then, after the 2018 World Cup, Alexander Golovin left Viktor Goncharenko's team for Monaco, and the entire defense, Sergei Ignashevich and the Berezutsky brothers, ended their careers.

Khetag Khosonov was the author of the winning goal in overtime, which is not easy to believe right now.

This suggests that you should not look for a special logic in the outcomes of matches for this trophy from one game. The teams are just coming out of the offseason, they are raw, nothing has really been played yet. Do you remember last year, when the Bulls participated in the Super Bowl for the first time? Zenit dealt with them easily back then, it seemed like they were teams from two different leagues. And how did the season that started this way end? The fact that Krasnodar is the champion of Russia for the first time, Zenit was left without trophies in the centennial season announced by them (and then postponed to the start). So much for the logic.

On the other hand, the outcome of the 2018 Super Bowl suggests that the favorite does not always win. At that moment, CSKA seemed to be completely incomprehensible — but come on, you took and beat the champion Loko. I mean, even though Krasnodar looks like the obvious favorite, any turns are possible in Kazan on Saturday. As, in fact, it always is when everything is decided in a single game.

The Mysterious Shift Worker

Why can Krasnodar be considered a clear favorite? Because none of his key players have left him (at least not yet), the head coach and his entire staff are in place, and they still have a hunger for titles. The army lost a key figure, Marko Nikolic, who left for Greece, and under circumstances that could not but demoralize them. To hear from a coach in the locker room after winning the Cup that they will qualify for the championship next season, and in a few days to be left without this coach, you would not wish that on anyone.

His replacement Fabio Celestini is just getting used to the new club, but there are big doubts that he will use Nikolic's highly specific system with a diamond in midfield, which requires long and fine adjustments. This means that it will be a different CSKA. Although, for pragmatic reasons, the Swiss champion coach can use it on old luggage in this particular match, there was still no time to play a new one, and with a diamond, the players, as they say, will remember their legs. And the heads. So I wouldn't be too surprised by this turn of events.

By the way, Murad Musayev and Nikolich have developed a warm relationship. When they met at the winter training camp earlier this year in the Emirates, the Serb promised the Russian: "We will beat Spartak in the spring, and you will become champions!" Musaev, seeing how Nikolic played his "diamond", replied: "And you will be in the championship race until the end!" The latter was completely unobvious at that time, since the gap between the leading Krasnodar and the red-blue, who occupied the sixth place, was eight points. But in the end, both specialists were right— well, almost right. CSKA lost its theoretical chances for gold only at the very end. But he won the bronze and the Cup.

The previous time before 2018, CSKA won the Super Bowl, and in 2014. In other words, it's impossible to say that the army team is used to churning out victories in this tournament: only one Super Bowl in the last 10 times. To be honest, without going into details, I assumed that all the previous ones had been won by Valery Gazzaev and Leonid Slutsky, but upon closer examination it turned out that they were spread out between the red and blue coaches in a thin layer: two each for Gazzaev and Slutsky, one each for Artur Georges, Zico and Goncharenko.. For the Portuguese and the Brazilian, these were the only trophies at the head of CSKA.

Therefore, it is groundless to say that Celestini has no chance. Jorge and Zico took the Super Cup each in their first official match at the head of the capital's team. It seems to me that it makes sense for Musaev to stress this, too, when he conducts motivational work with his team and explains why, even after the change of head coach, CSKA needs to be taken absolutely seriously.

In any case, it will be very interesting. The good old Krasnodar, which achieved championship success for the first time in its history. Old in terms of composition (Miralem Pjanic left from more or less important figures), but new in terms of the key figure of the CSKA head coach. Kazan, a beautiful stadium, one of the host arenas of the 2018 World Cup. The seed for the new season looks very intriguing.